Army officials said Wednesday that they had decided to send additional body armor to Iraq to protect soldiers from insurgents' attacks. The ceramic plates now worn by most members of the military shield just some of the upper body from bullets and shrapnel, and the Army said it would buy plates that would extend this protection to the sides of soldiers. The officials spoke after a closed session of the Senate Armed Services Committee, held after The New York Times reported last week that a Pentagon study had found that extra armor could have saved up to 80 percent of the marines who died in Iraq from upper body wounds. In at least 74 of the 93 fatal wounds that were analyzed, bullets and shrapnel struck the marines' sides, shoulders or areas of the torso where the protective plates did not reach.
The Marine Corps, which commissioned the study in December 2004, began buying side plates in September for its 26,000 troops in Iraq. Army procurement officials said they began studying a similar move last summer after receiving requests from troops in Iraq, but were hampered by the need to supply a much larger force of 160,000 individuals.
The Army had begun supplying small quantities of side plates to soldiers much earlier in the war through its Rapid Equipping Force. Armor Works of Tempe, Ariz., which is making the plates for the marines, said it shipped 250 sets in November 2003.
Another manufacturer, the Excera Materials Group of Columbus, Ohio, said that since late 2004 it had shipped 1,000 sets of side plates to Special Forces personnel, the Air Force and individual units that used their own procurement money to buy the armor. Citing security concerns, the Army has in recent days urged armor contractors not to disclose information about their work, even if the information is not classified, industry officials said....
So.
Only, what, two years after the issue was raised (and raised, and raised, and raised), the military is going to give their soldiers sufficient armor. Or so they say. (They did say this once before, and the armor has notably failed to actually appear.) And while there truly are good, sound policy reasons to request contractors not to reveal even unclassified information about their military work ... given the military's lack of progress in this arena, one wonders whether or not they're just worried about the PR. After all, it makes somewhat less sense to start sending over armor now that you're officially going into drawdown mode.
But still. I hope this gets there, and I hope it keeps them safer.
Posted by iain at January 12, 2006 04:46 PM
